Gabrielle Hunt - Outside Reading 1

Gabrielle Hunt

29 March 2012

Outside Reading 1 (Space Trilogy 3)

Ender and Aliens (Ender’s Game Spoilers?)

                While rereading Ender’s Game for the twelfth or thirteenth time, I was struck by how different Ender’s response is from Ransom’s Response to an alien race. This stems from the different cultures the two characters were surrounded by while living on Earth.

Ender grew up surrounded by the idea of Buggers as something real, something kids play at like Cowboys and Indians. Even though the aliens were unavoidably associated with a horrific killing spree that occurred during their first invasion (“The Scathing of China”) and a later attempted invasion (thwarted by Mazer Rackham), they are familiar to kids growing up on Earth. When you add to this that the queen was communicating with Ender via the Fantasy Game for almost the entire time he was in Battle School, when he later meets the queen for the first time (not face to face, when she is still cocooned and speaks directly into his mind without the intermediary of the Fantasy Game), it is completely understandable that Ender had some level of comfort with this strange new being.

Ransom’s reaction was different. Unlike Ender, he grew up thinking that extraterrestrial beings were not real, if not impossible. But also unlike Ender, he had several months to adjust to the idea of actually meeting one of these new alien creatures. He knew before he arrived on Malacandra that there were sorns to be watched out for. It’s because he didn’t grow up with the idea of aliens as a real, possible thing that he reacted with such utter fear when he arrived on the planet. It’s interesting that he didn’t react to the hross with such fear, though that could be because they didn’t look quite so “alien” to him, resembling something closer to a domesticated animal.